Love Letters to New Orleans

Agnes De Mille once said, “To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful. This is power, it is glory on earth and it is yours for the taking.” Her prolific words ring true especially in the context of modern dance—when expressions become whole body movements and unorganized routines reflecting some passion, some ideal, and some truth. After watching Love Letters to New Orleans, a performance by Sara and Patrik and Tulane dancers, I too can appreciate the human glory that is dance in its basest form.Love Letters to New Orleans began with an old woman playing the piano. The entire dance show was peppered with interviews and clips of New Orleans residents. The tragedy and destruction was felt firsthand as the dancers emulated their emotions through movements and dialogues. Sara’s solo in particular was moving to me, as it perfectly showed the rise and fall of New Orleans through her tortured movements. It was as though New Orleans was meant to be hit. In one way or another, the Big Easy received the Big One—the apocalyptic hurricane prophesized through tales and gossip for years. This too was mirrored by the dancers and the images they complemented. The move where they waved to pre-Katrina pictures of New Orleans perfection nearly brought tears to my eyes, as they were not only waving to the gorgeous houses shown on the screen, but to a way of life. This move was then paralleled by the clips of New Orleans’ young ballet dancers, people on the streets, and my dance teacher Alise waving and turning to look over their shoulders. It was quite sad, really, because everyone was waving goodbye to a way of life that we all used to have before the hurricane. Even us New Orleans college students are included here . . . .for the hurricane changed our lives too. How quickly, though, we move on past that and forget that problems with which we no longer deal (lack of clothes and books last semester when we went to different colleges) are problems that make up the daily lives of the 1/3 of New Orleans residents that have returned. If there’s a reason our bathrooms don’t get cleaned, the dorm looks a little messy, and every University Services company is grossly understaffed, its because of this new way of life. I hear residents complain all the time, and its unfortunate that they do not see past their superficial complaints to the root of the problems. There is no quick fix here in New Orleans . . . it is a slow, long process of recovery. Love Letters to New Orleans was the perfect performance to remind us of that. Although everything was lost in a classical moment of human downfall, rebuilding and restoring takes time. Hindsight is 20/20, and none of us can tell the future. The dancers in Love Letters showed this uncertainty coupled with desparation in their performance. One particular outstanding piece of dialogue was “I have seen the face of hell” and the sad part is that it’s true. Anyone here after the hurricane saw this human hell. But anyone here after that saw the purging of the society and the glorious but slow return to purgatory-like human existence.

The dialogues, clips, images, and dance routines in Love Letters to New Orleans all expressed human glory in some form or another. Although we give up one form of life pre-Katrina, we adopt another post-Katrina. It is performances like this that make sure we do not forget what we have been through, and why life in New Orleans is the way it is. The fact that this city is recovering at all is human glory, for what else can take us through the “face of hell?" And this dance performance has its role amongst all that—it expresses this glory bigger, and more beautiful. It is dancers escaping their normal roles, as Agnes De Mille suggests, but at the same time, these dancers do not escape reality. None of us do.